Friday Odds and Ends

It’s Friday and generally speaking a usual light traffic day on the blog. I had some quick links I’d like to share with my readers. First off there is this delusional woman from eBay who feels her “big huge” lot of 393 cards are going to take your breathe away so much that you are going to shell out between $500 – 1000 for this:

Clicking on the pictures will take you to the auction. I’ve already emailed her and it’s the usual garbage about how she would “lose money” if she listed it any lower. I don’t understand how someone who is a professional eBay seller, and seems like an antique dealer, doesn’t do her homework as to the true value of things. These are the kind of cards that I would consider to be commons. I told her that her cards are worth between a penny to a nickel each. The older football cards are nice, but they are pretty beat up. I just can think of a lot of other ways to spend that kind of dough. I mean you are talking Mickey Mantle autograph money. Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig relic card money (together as a lot). Anyhow I promised her traffic to her auction so that people can see just how insane this auction is, don’t let me down.

The other topic I wanted to touch on is a funny blog I came across called Bad Touch Baseball. It’s a Tumblr style blog, so a picture a day sort of thing, but oh so funny. Here is an example:

Finally I wanted to get the word out about this year’s Secret Santa. Last year we had about a dozen guys that were in on it and I think it went really well. I would like to host it again this year. So if you are interested in joining let me know and I’m thinking the sooner we start this the better so that we can get our shopping done sooner.

Like this:

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If you have ever been to an antique store, these cards make sense. Many items found while antiquing have no grounding in reality or supply and demand. For a fair number of dealers, the goal is to catch a buyer unaware and get them to pay a price outside of reality.

Not trying to be mean, but it’s not clear that the seller is anything close to a professional eBay seller. A feedback rating of a little over 200 in four years is not setting the world on fire, and there’s approaching twice as many ratings for her as a *buyer*, instead of a seller, for that double century rating.

It’s entirely possible she overpaid someone for sports themed bird cage liner, and desperately wants to pay that pain forward to a naive buyer, if one is willing.

CCC is totally right about sports cards in an antiquing environment. They park prices at (old) book, and seem entirely willing to keep paying rent on their stall, as if it’s an open storage unit, except decorated with doilies and scratched up Fiestaware.

As for that auction, I often see binders that look exactly like that in case at my local Goodwill for ten bucks, and I still pass that by for something actually mildly valuable, like Disney DVDs and Nintendo cartridges.